PHILOSOPHY 405: Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Witnessing

Dr. James Hatley

Office: Philosophy House on Camden Avenue

Phone: 410-677-5072, 543-7635

Office Hours: Monday, 2-3 pm, Tuesday 4:15-5 pm, Friday, 1-2 pm

Witnessing is that particular mode of knowledge in which we are called upon in our knowing to stand up and in for others. In witnessing, our knowing others is irremediably linked to our being responsible for them. This is particularly true in cases where the other for and to whom we give our witness has suffered injustice or betrayal. Hatley’s Suffering Witness and Oliver’s Witnessing Beyond Recognition turn to a variety of contemporary thinkers in continental philosophy to understand better the significance of witnessing as an ethical, political and epistemological category. Particularly important in their respective projects is the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. In Suffering Witness, we will encounter how the Shoah or Holocaust is a particular moment of betrayal and injustice that calls for a radical notion of responsibility. We will inquire why it remains important for the generations who come after this particular event to become witnesses for and of it, even if they were not present at it. In Witnessing Beyond Recognition, we will pose the question of witness in a more general way to think about how each of us is called to witness for others in the contemporary situation. In both writers, the metaphysics and politics of identity are radically undermined. Both writers suggest our notion of self, at least insofar as self can be said to have an identity, is not a primary given but derived from our ethical and political engagement with others.

Texts:

Required:

a) Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi

b) Suffering Witness, James Hatley

c) Witnessing Beyond Recognition, Kelly Oliver

d) We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with your families: Stories from Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch

Recommended:

a) Studies in Practical Philosophy: The Politics of Witnessing (Volume III, number 2)

Grading:

Weekly Reading Questions (10) 30%

Response Paper to Suffering Witness 20%

Response Paper to Witnessing Beyond Recognition 20%

Class Presentations (4) 10%

Rewrite of a Weekly Question (2) 20%

Readings and Assignments

WEEK ONE: Abraham Bomba’s Testimony in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah

WEEK TWO: 2/1-3, Survival in Auschwitz: Preface, The Journey, Initiation, On the Bottom, KaBe

Weekly Reading Questions: a) Why are you, as the reader of Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, threatened with a curse in the volume’s Preface? Does that seem fair to you? b) The preface mirrors a prayer to said in the Jewish daily liturgy just after the Shema (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our G-d is One”). Does knowing this fact make a difference in how you would read Levi’s Preface? Why or why not? c) In the four chapters you’ve read, which event recorded by Levi seems the most dehumanizing? Why?

Shema

Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our G-d, the Lord is One.

Blessed be the name of his glorious majesty forever and ever.

Deuteronomy 6: 4-9

You shall love the Lord your G-d with all your heart,

and with all your soul, and with all your might.

And these words, which I command you today, shall be in your heart.

You shall teach them diligently to your children,

and you shall speak of them when you are sitting at home

and when you go on a journey,

when you lie down and when you rise up.

You shall bind them for a sign on your hand,

and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes.

You shall inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Witnessing the Shoah in the Classroom: Some Thoughts

WEEK THREE: 2/8-10, Suffering Witness, chp. 1, Survival in Auschwitz: This side of Good and Evil, The Drowned and the Saved, The Canto of Ulysses

Weekly Reading Questions: a) What is meant by quandary, in Hatley’s use of this term? Give an example of a quandary that occurs in our witnessing the Haeftling, the inmate of the death camp. b) What are the different senses of “annihilation” at work in a phenomenology of camp existence?; or altneratively, What is meant by the term “death world” in regard to the phenomenology of camp existence? c) Do you think any reason be given to justify what happened to the Haeftling? Why or why not?

Yad Vashem

United States Holocaust Memorial

Genocide in Darfur, Sudan

WEEK FOUR: 2/15-17, Suffering Witness, chp. 2

Weekly Reading Questions: a) What is meant by aenocide? Why does Hatley prefer this term to genocide? b) What is the significance of Rausch in the death world of the camps? c) In what way(s) does Hatley argue that Kantian rationality fails in the death camps? Do you agree or disagree with Hatley’s argument? d) What is the particular form that witness takes in a post-holocaust world? How does a post-holocaust witness alter the very notion of witness?

WEEK FIVE: 2/22-24, Suffering Witness, chp. 3

Weekly Reading Questions: a) Why is Levinas so critical of what he calls “a rational peace”? b) How does the human face suggest a peace beyond one that is merely “rational,” i.e. the outcome of a calculation? c) What is meant by the words of Levinas, quoted on pg. 85, “The face to face situation is…an impossibility of negating the negation of a negation”? d) What does the author mean by the term “gratuitous witness”?

WEEK SIX: 3/1-3, Suffering Witness, chp. 3

WEEK SEVEN: 3/8-10, Suffering Witness, chp. 4

Weekly Reading Questions: a) Why does Lang object to using literature to witness the Holocaust? Do you agree or disagree (or both) with his argument? b) What does Levinas mean by “historiography”? c) What is meant by prophetic witness? Do you think prophetic witness is more or less historical than historiography? Why? d) What is meant by “tonality”?

WEEK EIGHT: 3/15-17 CALLED DUE TO ILLNESS

SPRING BREAK

WEEK NINE: 3/29-31, Suffering Witness, chp. 4; Introduction to Witnessing: Beyond Recognition

Weekly Reading Questions: 1) Discuss the tension between historians and psychoanalysts remarked upon by Oliver. 2) What is the doubled meaning of witnessing? 3) Why is Oliver suspicious of the demand for recognition, even on the part of those who have been oppressed?

First Rewrite of a Weekly Question Due.

WEEK TEN: 4/5-7, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, chps. 1-2

Weekly Reading Questions: 1) How does Fanon’s account of oppression put into question a politics of recognition? 2) What does Fanon mean by “doubled alienation” and “doubled misrecognition”? 3) How does love function for Fanon? 4) Characterize one of the following approaches to identity politics: Fraser, Young, Lugones or Williams.

FIRST RESPONSE PAPER DUE .

This paper is to be around 4 pages long. It is not going to be due the week after spring break, but the week after that, on Thursday, April 7th*so that we have some more time to go over Chapter Four of Suffering Witness during the last week of March after the Spring Break. But you should get started on the project right away*do some research and start making notes.

The Assignment:

Read the article below, which gives a CNN story on the use of the historical event of the Holocaust (Nazi Genocide/Shoah) by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) to provoke protests against the alleged abuse of animals raised and slaughtered to feed human beings.

This advertising campaign on the part of PETA occurs allegedly in a mode of historical witness*it brings the Holocaust forward to the generations who were not there, in order to provoke an ethical reaction on their part (i.e. you and me, the generations who inherit the legacy of the Holocaust) to the suffering of others. But not everyone agrees that this use of the Holocaust is a responsible one. Do you think that the PETA campaign fits into the notion of prophetic and deliberative witness elaborated by Hatley in Chapter Four of his book? Why or why not? Further, would you argue this particular campaign by PETA responsibly witnesses the Holocaust? Why or why not? Finally, what sort of responsibilities do you personally assume in regard to those who suffered in the Death Camps by being a member of a generation who comes after the Holocaust?

Be careful in your argument!

THE ARTICLE:

Group blasts PETA 'Holocaust' project

(CNN) --The Anti-Defamation League has denounced a campaign by an animal rights group that compares slaughtering animals to the murder of 6 million Jews in World War II.

The graphic campaign and exhibit "Holocaust on Your Plate," devised by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, juxtaposes 60-square-foot panels displaying gruesome scenes from Nazi death camps side by side with disturbing photographs from factory farms and slaughterhouses. One shows a starving man in a concentration camp next to a starving cow.

The exhibit opens Friday in San Diego, California, and went up Thursday at the University of California at Los Angeles. It also is posted on a PETA Web site, www.masskilling.com, which calls for support for the campaign from the Jewish community.

The comparisons prompted an angry statement from Abraham Foxman, Anti-Defamation League national director and a Holocaust survivor.

"The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate, systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent," the statement said. "PETA's effort to seek approval for their 'Holocaust on Your Plate' campaign is outrageous, offensive and takes chutzpah to new heights."

Lisa Lange, PETA's vice president of communications, told CNN's "American Morning With Paula Zahn" on Friday that the idea for the public relations effort came from the late Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who, she said, wrote: "In relation to them [animals], all people are Nazis; for them it is an eternal Treblinka" -- a death camp in Poland.

Lange said the campaign is appropriate because "Nazi concentration camps were modeled after slaughterhouses."

The Singer quote, which the group draws upon in its literature as well, was not spoken directly by him but rather comes from his novel "Enemies: A Love Story," when the main character muses on the plight of animals. Singer was a vegetarian who believed strongly in animal rights.

"It's shocking, it's startling, it's very hard to look at," Lange said of the exhibit. "We're attacking the mind-set" that condones the slaughter of animals.

"The very same mind-set that made the Holocaust possible -- that we can do anything we want to those we decide are 'different or inferior' -- is what allows us to commit atrocities against animals every single day," PETA representative Mark Prescott wrote in a statement, which added that members of Prescott's family were murdered by Nazis.

The Anti-Defamation League statement, however, counters that "abusive treatment of animals should be opposed, but cannot and must not be compared to the Holocaust."

WEEK ELEVEN: 4/12-14, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, chps. 4,5

4/14: Discuss how Harriet Jacob's autobiography addresses the paradoxes of witnessing outlined by Oliver. (Chpp. 4)

The Disappeared of Argentina

Truth and Reconciliation Committee of South Africa

WEEK TWELVE: 4/19-21, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, chp. 5, 7

4/19: How might the charge of "reverse discrimination" be a sort of "false witness" for Oliver? Do you agree or disagree with her analysis of this issue? (Chp. 5)

4/21: Why does Oliver question the notion of a color-blind society? (Chp. 7)

Second Rewrite of a Weekly Question Due

WEEK THIRTEEN: 4/26-28, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, chps. 9, 10

WEEK FOURTEEN: 5/3-5, We Wish to Inform You, pp. 1-43

PBS Report on Western Indifference to Rwandan Genocide

International Crime Tribunal for Rwanda

United States Institute for Peace

Rwandan Genocide Project--Yale Genocide Studies Program

WEEK FIFTEEN: 5/10, We Wish to Inform You, pp. 47-110

FINALS WEEK: SECOND RESPONSE PAPER DUE